Yesterday we looked at the first and last London postcodes, alphabetically speaking, that's E1 0AA and WC2R 3XP. Today let's look at the first and last postcodes in London, alphabetically speaking, because they're very much not the same thing.
The London postal district consists of eight postcode areas, namely E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC. But they by no means cover the whole of Greater London, with another thirteen postcode areas used on post delivered in the capital. There's HA for Harrow, for example,and KT for Kingston and RM for Romford. Most importantly, for our purposes, some of these outer London postcode areas come before E in the alphabet. Take DA for Dartford, for example, which covers parts of Bexley. Or CR for Croydon, which would be fun because Croydon is another of those rare postcode areas with a district zero. But one other area beats the lot of them, alphabetically speaking, and that's BR for Bromley.
London's first postcode(alphabetically speaking) BR1 1AA: Ask Italian, 3 East Street, Bromley
Yes, the very first postcode in Greater London belongs to an Italian restaurant. It's not even a proper Italian restaurant, but a chain, but then that's precisely what you'd expect in the middle of a large town centre. If you fancy a Pronto Lunch or a Ravioli Marittimi then this Bromley North Village eaterie is the place to be, but maybe give the outside tables a miss until the weather gets a little warmer. There is of course a very good reason why a pizza outlet should be top of the list, and that's because up until ten years ago the building it occupies was Bromley's main Post Office. This opened in 1897, with the slightly less ornate extension where Ask Italian now trades added in 1913. As this was the location of the district head office it was central Bromley which won the designation BR1, back when all of this was in Kent, with this pre-eminent building allocated the postcode BR1 1AA in the 1970s.
But there is a postcode mystery bubbling here. The restaurant nextdoor at 3a East Street is a Tex-Mex eaterie called Chimichanga, whose copywriters promise buzz and zing and dazzle should you choose to dine within. Look up above its three arched windows and you can see the words 'Post Office' beautifully carved into the stonework, confirming the building's original tenure. But Chimichanga has the postcode BR1 1AB, despite being the older and more important bit of the former Post Office, and it's not alone. Eight luxury flats were carved out of the upper storeys after counter services moved to the local W H Smith, and they all have the postcode BR1 1AB too. Only Ask Italian appears to have kept the top prize of BR1 1AA... and the only convincing evidence for this is on the restaurant's website.
So maybe it's not Ask. A number of online services peddle postcodeinformation, and if you ask them where BR1 1AA is located they don't mention East Street at all. Instead they suggest that this super-postcode is to be found a quarter of a mile down the High Street, up a rather less important sideroad, in a newbuild block...
London's first postcode(alphabetically speaking) BR1 1AA: Henry House, Ringers Road, Bromley
Ringers Road is a short sharply-descending street, tumbling down from Laura Ashley and TK Maxx on Bromley High Street to a small Quaker meeting hall at the bottom. It's the road where the 126 bus parks up before heading off to Eltham with a hill start, and where you come for your dialysis appointment if your kidneys are dodgy. The site of a former department store on the southern side had been lying dormant for a while, with a footbridge that needed demolition, and a sequence of redevelopment plans were drawn up and referred to the Mayor because they proposed building at height.
A pair of nine-/ten-storey blocks is the result, recently completed and awkwardly laid out thanks to the sloping ground. The toppermost tower is Henry House, presumably named after somebody locally relevant, and it's here that our postcode of interest unexpectedly appears. Several flats in the block have been awarded the postcode BR1 1AA, maybe all 30-odd of them, or maybe only a selection - the internet again refuses to provide rock-solid evidence. But if you've snapped up a starter home here in the last few months then you have the very first postcode in Greater London. You and maybe an Italian restaurant.
Surely there'll be greater certainty regarding the last postcode in Greater London? Well, don't be so sure. What's definite is that we need to cross town to the Watford area, because WD is the only postcode area which lines up alphabetically after WC. Intriguingly only a tiny, tiny fraction of the Watford postcode area falls within the boundaries of Greater London, and deliberately so. There's a patch north of Harefield along Springwell Lane, where very few people live, which is part of WD3. There's a smidgeon of land by Stirling Corner, outside Borehamwood, which is part of WD6. And there's a row of cottages in Bushey Heath, near Bentley Priory, which is part of WD23. It should be obvious which of these comes last, alphabetically speaking.
London's last postcode(alphabetically speaking) WD23 1NX: Magpie Hall Lane, Bushey Heath
Let's start with a bit of Watford's postcodehistory. Watford used to have seven postcode districts, numbered 1 to 7, but the first two of these became subject to "postcode exhaustion" and were redesignated in September 2000. WD1 was split into WD17, WD18 and WD19, managing to make all of central Watford sound less significant overnight, while WD2 was subdivided into WD23, WD24 and WD25. The new postcode district for Bushey was WD23, and it's this which nudges over the Greater London boundary at Bushey Heath. Magpie Hall Lane is the exact dividing line where Herts meets London, but it makes sense for letters on either side to be delivered from the same van, so a handful of properties in the borough of Harrow have a Watford address.
The only two Bushey postcodes within Greater London are WD23 1NT and WD23 1NX. The first of these contains three detached properties, two currently shrouded in scaffolding so that builders can swarm all over them. It's a shame this isn't the last postcode, because one of the houses is apparently the address of 'The Bag Factory Limited', and it would have been interesting to dig up what that's about. Meanwhile WD23 1NX contains six residences, half of which are substantial modern detached homes set back in their own secluded cul-de-sac. This trio are called Ashdown, Woodland and Fernwood, because house-builders always reckon tree-related names have a classy suburban cachet. More full of character are the three homes known as Heathfield Cottages, which are older conjoined stock with front-facing gables. Number 1 is the poshest, or likes to think it is, hence the lions on the gateposts and the sharply-pointed conifers. Numbers 2 and 3 are plainer, but none the less desirable, plus they had their bins out which is always the best way to confirm that this is Harrow not Hertsmere. Definitely the last unit in London's postcode list, this, unless...
There's one last problem to consider, and that's what 'alphabetical order' really means. You'd think WD3 comes before WD6 comes before WD23, because that's the way the numbers run, but a computer would see things rather differently. The generally accepted convention for sorting an alphanumeric list is that spaces come before numbers come before letters, which means WD23 isn't at the bottom of the list. It has a '2' as its 3rd character, whereas WD3 has a '3' as its third character and WD6 has a '6', so they both appear after WD23. Indeed if you try sorting these three strings in a spreadsheet, it will confirm the correct order as WD23, WD3, WD6. And if you accept that, then we need to travel four miles east to a roundabout on the Barnet Bypass.
London's last postcode(alphanumerically speaking) WD6 2RW: Elstree Park, Stirling Corner, Borehamwood
Stirling Corner is a ridiculously busy roundabout where the A1 crosses the A411, and sits on the very edge of the capital. Two of the surrounding quadrants are wholly in London (the Shell garage and the Harvester) and one is wholly in Hertfordshire (the Morrisons). It's the southwest quadrant that's the problem, because that's a bit of both. This didn't matter when the Greater London boundary was drawn up in 1965, but in 1990 the Berkeley Leisure Group came along and built a retirement park. Specifically they swirled two looping roads around a field, called it Elstree Park and added approximately 150 mobile homes. Some of these lie in Hertfordshire and some in London, and some in both because you can plonk a chalet anywhere. But the whole park is in the WD6 postcode, and all the tenants pay council tax at Barnet rates, making this one crazy mixed-up location.
I really wanted to go inside Elstree Park and have a look, but a sign at the entrance pointed out that this was private property and so I chickened out. In particular the park office is located in the first cottage past the white posts, and they'd no doubt have been peering out, plus a number of residents were walking back from Morrisons with their shopping and they'd soon have spotted I didn't fit in. A shame, because I would have loved to try and locate one of the chalets that straddles the unseen line, and to be able to show you a proper photograph from within. Instead I got no further than the park noticeboard, where I learned that milk is delivered daily, parking a boat is forbidden, and the only permitted pet is one cat per chalet. I am now old enough to move in, however, should I ever decide that a geographically schizophrenic location at the foot of London's postcode pecking order is for me.
"I recently had to go to Whitechapel and realised the postcode I wanted was probably one of the first in an alphabetic list of postcodes of London, which made me think, what would be the first and last and what would they be like."
Well, there's an irresistible idea, I thought.
The London postal district consists of eight postcode areas, namely E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC. Top of the shop alphabetically speaking is E for East London, specifically E1, the postcode district for Whitechapel. These numbered districts were first introduced in 1917, with the location of the district head office allocated '1', and subsequent districts numbered alphabetically.
The first London postcode(alphabetically speaking) E1 1AA: Royal Mail Whitechapel Delivery Office, 206 Whitechapel Road
Whitechapel hasn't always been home to the Eastern District Office - this started out in Commercial Road until it became clear in the 1880s that far larger premises were required. A patch of waste ground alongside the Royal London Hospital was selected, and a three-storey redbrick building constructed with a sorting office out back. Around the turn of the century a doubling in size was required, and the Mail Rail arrived in the basement in 1927, this being the eastern terminus of the line.
The most recent expansion on site came in 1970 when a tall Modernist building was erected to a standard concrete design, presenting a stark modular frontage towards the Whitechapel Road. A mechanised workflow occupied the open-plan rooms on the upper floors, while ground level comprised a loading yard and the public-facing Crown Post Office. Over 2000 workers were employed here in the building's heyday, processing mail for the entire ‘E’ postal district, at what eventually became known as the East London Mail Centre. But the majority of work was later transferred to an industrial estate in Bromley-by-Bow, and subsequently Mount Pleasant, with all operations at Whitechapel ceasing in 2012. [full history]
A variety of temporary tenants now lurk on the building's upper floors, including Crossrail staff, while the site has been classified by Tower Hamlets council as a 'strategic regeneration opportunity'. But the E1 1AA postcode survives, for now, in the form of the Whitechapel Delivery Office. This is where you come if live locally and your postman tries to deliver a package while you're out, and consists of a small grim room for queueing and collection. As for the former Post Office nextdoor, that's been an echoing empty space for a few years now, with all its fixtures and fittings ripped out... as you can see if you peer in through the grime on the front window. A less Crown-like Post Office has been installed in a shop unit a few doors up the road, slotted underneath the Methodist Church, now reduced to a queueing slalom and a counter, and sharing space with an independent travel company and currency exchange.
Except hang on. I assumed E1 1AA would be the first E1 postcode, except some subsequent research revealed it's not. E1 turns out to be one of seven high-density postcode districts in London to have been additionally subdivided, which is how a riverside strip was reallocated to E1W in 1999. More importantly, for alphabetical purposes, an E1 0 postcode sector was introduced along E1W's northern border, and E1 0 beats E1 1. So I had to go out with my camera again...
Actually the first London postcode(alphabetically speaking) E1 0AA: St Mary & St Michael RC Church, The Presbytery, 2 Lukin Street
I was not expecting this. The first E1 postcode belongs to a Roman Catholic church on Commercial Road, roughly in the vicinity of Shadwell station, a few streets east of Watney Market. St Mary & St Michael is a high-peaked whopper, opened as 'The Cathedral of the East End' in 1857, although that's an entirely unofficial title. In its day this was the largest Roman Catholic church in the capital, its parish taking in most of Stepney, hence the need for all those pews inside. The most dramatic event here was a wedding in March 1945, interrupted as the guests were arriving by the unexpected impact of one of the last V2 rockets to strike London. Although the church's roof was destroyed, and a number of people sadly died, the participants dusted themselves down and the ceremony went ahead amid the rubble.
Technically E1 0AA is the postcode not of the church but of the Presbytery nextdoor, a plainer block on Lukin Street which acts as church hall and office, and thereby hosts the letterbox into which the church's mail is delivered. It's not the only E1 0AA building along here either, eleven others share the same postcode, including the neighbouring Bishop Challoner Community Centre. This mostly sporty facility is under the care of the local secondary school, which too is a whopper, with a girls' school on one side of the street and boys' on the other linked by a curving grey skybridge of intrusively modern design.
The school itself isn't within our chosen postcode, but ten modest terraced homes fill out the remainder of the postie's round. They're very much late 20th century, when Tower Hamlets still built houses rather than flats, and with a cul-de-sac of similar properties squished in behind. I did at first wonder whether every house around here was owned by a cabbie, given how many black cabs were parked up along the road, but it turns out two of the arches under the DLR belong to a bodyshop approved by the London Taxi Company, hence the queues. Whatever, I love the fact that the first London postcode belongs collectively to a few random council house residents who may not realise the pre-eminence of the last line of their address.
As for the last London postcode I'd initially assumed this would be a W, and indeed wasted time touring the streets of Westbourne Park to investigate. But no, WC beats W, so I had to divert my attention to central London instead. The West Central postcode is split into two parts, that's WC1 and WC2, with WC2 further subdivided into six alphabetically-appended districts. It's the last of these that interests us, namely WC2R, which covers a broad area between the Strand and the Embankment, roughly around Somerset House and the Temple.
The last London postcode(alphabetically speaking) WC2R 3XP: Liberata UK Ltd, PO Box 36838
Now that's disappointing. The last London postcode currently in use belongs to a PO Box, not an actual place you can go and visit. OK, technically somebody has to go and collect the post, so technically the location is the Mount Pleasant sorting office in Clerkenwell, but that'll also be the case for thousands of other PO Boxes. The business with the good fortune to be served by London's concluding postcode is Liberata, which is one those service companies that delivers things on behalf of government rather that government employing civil servants to do it for them. Founded in 1975, Liberata rejoices in being a "trusted and reliable operating partner delivering specialist business process services", with a modern nod towards automating and digitalising, natch.
Except hang on. Liberata's Head Office is in Wood Street in the City of London, postcode EC2V 7AN, and I'm not allowing that when this is supposed to be WC2. So let's pick again.
Properly the last London postcode(alphabetically speaking) WC2R 3LL: The Temple Bar, 1 Milford Lane
Hurrah, it's a pub! What's more it's a pub in the warren of streets down the western edge of the Temple, so you're quite likely to find a clerk or barrister supping within. Milford Lane is a narrow thoroughfare leading south from the Strand and meandering down to the Thames, quite picturesque in its pedestrianised lower reaches. The Temple Bar is at the northern end, on the street corner opposite St Clement Dane's, and has been inebriating the local population since 1839. As a free house it serves more interesting beer than most, and there's a distinctly sporting theme to much of its publicity - come watch the Six Nations in our second floor bar, that kind of thing. The pub also promotes itself as a filming location, should you have a legal drama requiring lubrication, and the exterior boasts delightfully evocative bay windows and wooden panelling.
Or so I expected. Alas the currently reality is roadworks, on a massively disruptive scale, with all bar a narrow strip of lane outside the pub sealed off for digging and replacement. The guilty project is the 190 Strand development, a massive residential landgrab currently swallowing up a substantial area to the north of Temple station. A 1960s office block is being replaced by "a luxurious new development of suites, apartments and penthouses", entirely unaffordably, coupled with "a range of streetscape improvements including substantial upgrading of the public realm". At present the repaving of Milford Lane is running at least two months behind schedule, and The Temple Bar's landlord must be cursing every additional day. But if you head down to WC2R 3LL, and can be heard above the noise of drills, you too can down a pint in what's technically the ultimate pub in London.
Today we've been looking at what I believe to be the first and last London postcodes. Tomorrow we'll take a look at the first and last postcodes in London...
